Cloud Computing today, is an evolving technology which features large Data Storage and ready-to-access from any device. The Healthcare Industry stores large Databases of patient’s records, considering the advantages of Cloud Computing it is looking forward to moving on from the traditional, proprietary Database Management Model into an Open Source Cloud DBMS Model. To complete this transition, it is of primary importance to provide Privacy and Security for Electronic Medical Record / Electronic Health Record. There are several kinds of research being done on how to mitigate these privacy issues using algorithms like Attribute Based Encryption and Identity-Based Encryption. In this study, we compare the performance of these two attribute based encryption methods. This thesis compares the performance of the state-of-the-art Attribute Based Encryption Schemas for Electronic Medical Record / Electronic Health Record Systems. Performance evaluation is conducted in local and cloud environments. A Literature Review has been performed to identify the existing Cloud-based Electronic Health Record Systems which uses the attribute based encryption as a mechanism to mitigate the privacy issues and realization in Cloud. Two algorithms have been selected by performing snowballing from the IEEE Research Articles. Experimentation was performed on the two algorithms in a local machine and on Amazon Web Services Cloud Platform to compare the performance. Verification of performance in each stage of the execution of the algorithms, in both local machine and Cloud environment, was done.

An extensive analysis of attribute-based encryption (ABE) in systems with resource constrained devices is performed. Two system solutions of how ABE can be performed in such systems are proposed, one where the ABE operations are performed at the resource constrained devices and one where ABE is performed at a powerful server. The system solutions are discussed with three different ABE schemes. Two of the schemes are the traditional key policy ABE (KP-ABE) and ciphertext policy ABE (CP-ABE). The third scheme is using KP-ABE to simulate CP-ABE, in an attempt to benefit from KP-ABE being computationally cheaper than CP-ABE while maintaining the intuitive way of using CP-ABE. ABE is a computationally expensive encryption method which might not be feasible to perform at the resource constrained sensors, depending on the hardware. An implementation of a CP-ABE scheme with a 128 bit security level was written and used to evaluate the feasibility of ABE on a sensor equipped with an ARM Cortex-M3 processor having 32 kB RAM and 256 kB flash. It is possible to perform CP-ABE on the sensor used in this project. The limiting factor of feasibility of ABE on the sensor is the RAM size. In this case policy sizes up to 12 attributes can be performed on the sensor. The results give an idea of the feasibility of encryption with ABE on sensors. In addition to the results several ways of improving performance of ABE on the sensor are discussed.

Problem There is a lack of knowledge about how Swedish SMEs make decisions on IT service selection. There is also lack of information about the attributes of IT service providers that are most important to Swedish SMEs. By discovering these attributes, IT service providers could focus on improving their services in those dimensions and become more attractive for Swedish small and medium enterprises. Purpose The purpose of this research is to investigate the decision making process over selection of IT services for small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs) in Sweden. Additionally, this research intends to discover the most important features (attributes) of an IT service provider in its selection. What are the steps involved in decision-making process? What decision-making methods can be used to help explain the process that goes on in the minds of the decision makers? What aspects influence their behaviour when decision makers prefer one service provider to another? IT service comprises of internet-based services such as web hosting, email services, online backup services and cloud apps or locally offered IT services such as IT helpdesk. The candidates who were interviewed were employees or entrepreneurs who work and live in Sweden. Method This research was conducted with an inductive approach using mono method for semi-structured interviews for primary data collection. Secondary data collection was multiple-source through literature reviews in order to learn about different attributes and current knowledge about this subject. The research method was qualitative with exploratory strategy in order to get insights into managers’ decision-making processes. Sampling was non-probability purposive method with sample size as saturation method. The focus was illustrative and method chosen as typical case. Conclusion The conclusions of this thesis illustrates that the important attributes (features) of IT services required by Swedish SMEs are the requirement that the service is being offered from Sweden, due to tax conformity laws and security matters. Moreover, SAT, WADD, FRQ and EBA are decision-making heuristics in use by the companies in selection of suitable IT services.

Context: Determining attribute correspondence is the most important, time consuming and knowledge intensive part during databases integration. It is also used in other data manipulation applications such as data warehousing, data design, semantic web and e-commerce. Objectives: In this thesis the aim is to investigate how to find the types of correspondence between the attributes of heterogeneous datasets when schema design information of the data sets is unknown. Methods: A literature review was conducted to extract the knowledge related to the approaches that are used to find the correspondence between the attributes of heterogeneous datasets. Extracted knowledge from the literature review is used in developing an instance based approach for finding types of correspondence between the attributes of heterogeneous datasets when schema design information is unknown. To validate the proposed approach an experiment was conducted in the real environment using the data provided by the Telecom Industry (Ericsson) Karlskrona. Evaluation of the results was carried using the well known and mostly used measures from information retrieval field precision, recall and F-measure. Results: To find the types of correspondence between the attributes of heterogeneous datasets, good results depend on the ability of the algorithm to avoid the unmatched pairs of rows during the Row Similarity Phase. An evaluation of proposed approach is performed via experiments. We found 96.7% (average of three experiments) F-measure. Conclusions: The analysis showed that the proposed approach was feasible to be used and it provided users a mean to find the corresponding attributes and the types of correspondence between corresponding attributes, based on the information extracted from the similar pairs of rows from the heterogeneous data sets where their similarity based on the same common primary keys values.

Doctor of Philosophy / Department of Agricultural Economics / Ted C. Schroeder / Contingent valuation (CV), choice experiment (CE) and experimental auction (EA) or the combinations of the three methods are often used by researchers to elicit consumer willingness to pay for food attributes (food label). The main concern about these approaches is that different quality attributes of food are assumed independent. The problem of the independence assumption of a food attribute is that one attribute can signal information about another attribute or could be a proxy of overall product quality. In addition, in surveys consumers tend to be forced to focus on the limited attribute information that are presented by researchers, whereas in the real world, consumers have various sources of food quality information. The limited attributes provided in a survey may lead respondents to allocate their budgets to those limited attributes rather than allocate their budgets to a larger number of product attributes to truly reveal their preferences. The main objective of this study is to reveal the marginal impacts of additional food quality attributes on consumer WTP for food labels. Surveys containing a series of online CEs were collected to investigate the effects of additional beef steak attributes on consumer WTP in two different US markets. Both surveys included the same four questionnaires. Two questionnaires test the effect of additional attributes when no cue attributes are provided to the respondents, while the other two questionnaires test the effect of additional attributes when cue attributes are also presented. Every questionnaire contains two CEs, with the second CE having one more attribute than the first. Random parameters logit models are estimated for each CE in the four questionnaires with survey results from both samples, resulting in 16 sets of estimations altogether. The models with the different survey samples reveal consistent results regarding changes in WTP with more attributes added to the CEs. Consumer WTP for the most important attributes in the CE decreases when the number of attributes increases from three to four, while the WTP for the most important attributes increases when the number of attribute increase from four to five. The changes in the WTP for attributes depend on their relationships with the newly added attributes to the CEs and the number of attributes in CEs.

This study focuses on exploring the relative importance of six influential factors in cruise customers’ decision-making process such as: cruise vacation price, cruise duration, distance from the cruise port, itineraries, environmental friendliness of cruise line and cruise online reviews. The decision on which influencing factors to select was made based on the review of literature. The complexity of cruise customers’ decision-making process for these six attributes with several levels was examined with Choice-Based Conjoint (CBC) Analysis. CBC was selected due to its realistic approach to purchase decisions, in the form of trade-offs. The online survey collected data anonymously. The survey was distributed through Amazon Mechanical Turk (Mturk) platform. Only 450 cruise customers, who had experienced a cruise vacation before were eligible to participate in the study. The purpose of the study was to discover the relative importance of the influencing factors to gain more insights about cruise customers. The findings of the study showed that online reviews were the most influential attribute for cruise customers in their cruise decision, followed very closely by the environmental friendliness of the cruise line. The next influential factor was the duration of the cruise vacation which was followed by distance from the cruise port, cruise itinerary and cruise vacation price. The best and the worst cruise vacation profile were generated from CBC analysis. The findings of this study provide some insights with regard to cruise customers’ importance about influencing factors when deciding on a cruise vacation.

Um dos grandes desafios em mineração de dados é a integração de dados temporais ao seu processo. Existe um grande número de aplicações emergentes que envolvem dados temporais, incluindo a identificação de transações fraudulentas em cartões de crédito e ligações telefônicas, a detecção de intrusão em sistemas computacionais, a predição de estruturas secundárias de proteínas, a análise de dados provenientes de sensores, entre muitas outras. Neste trabalho, tem-se interesse na classificação de séries temporais que representam sinais de áudio. Como aplicação principal, tem-se interesse em classificar sinais de insetos coletados por um sensor óptico, que deve ser capaz de contar e classificar os insetos de maneira automática. Apesar de serem coletados opticamente, os sinais capturados se assemelham a sinais de áudio. O objetivo desta pesquisa é comparar métodos de classificação por similaridade e por extração de atributos que possam ser utilizados no contexto da classificação de insetos. Para isso, foram empregados os principais métodos de classificação de sinais de áudio, que têm sido propostos para problemas como reconhecimento de instrumentos musicais, fala e espécies animais. Neste trabalho, é mostrado que, de modo geral, a abordagem por extração de atributos é mais eficaz do que a classificação por similaridade. Mais especificamente, os melhores resultados são obtidos com a utilização de coeficientes mel-cepstrais. Este trabalho apresenta contribuições significativas em outras aplicações, também relacionadas à análise de séries temporais e sinais de áudio, por similaridade e por extração de atributos / One of the major challenges in data mining is the integration of temporal data to its process. There are a number of emerging applications that involve temporal data, including fraud detection in credit card transactions and phone calls, intrusion detection in computer systems, the prediction of secondary structures of proteins, the analysis of data from sensors, and many others. In this work, our main interest is the classification of time series that represent audio signals. Our main interest is an application for classifying signals of insects collected from an optical sensor, which should count and classify insects automatically. Although these signals are optically collected, they resemble audio signals. The objective of this research is to compare classification methods based on similarity and feature extraction in the context of insects classification. For this purpose, we used the main classification methods for audio signals, which have been proposed for problems such as musical instrument, speech and animal species recognition. This work shows that, in general, the approach based on feature extraction is more accurate than the classification by similarity. More specifically, the best results are obtained with mel-frequency cepstrum coefficients. This work also presents significant contributions in other applications, also related to the analysis of time series and audio signals by similarity and feature extraction

O surgimento e a popularização de arquiteturas de software que fornecem suporte à programação distribuída orientada a objetos, como CORBA, .NET e Java EE, gerou uma demanda por infra-estruturas de segurança eficientes, capazes de proteger os recursos dos sistemas de ataques maliciosos. Essa proteção começa pela identificação dos usuários que interagem com os sistemas, processo conhecido como autenticação. Entretanto, a autenticação por si só não é suficiente para garantir a segurança dos recursos, uma vez que a autenticação não determina quais ações os usuários estão autorizados a executar depois de autenticados. Em outras palavras, um mecanismo de autorização, que faz valer as políticas de controle de acesso aos recursos definidas pelos administradores de sistemas, se faz necessário. Neste trabalho estudamos mecanismos de controle de acesso baseado em papéis e a aplicabilidade dos certificados de atributos X.509 como estrutura de armazenamento desses papéis em um ambiente Java EE. Em particular, estendemos a infra-estrutura de segurança do servidor de aplicações JBoss, de modo que ela passasse a comportar os certificados de atributos X.509. Além disso, analisamos as vantagens e desvantagens do uso de tais certificados e avaliamos o desempenho da extensão desenvolvida em relação a outras alternativas que são oferecidas pelo JBoss para o armazenamento de papéis dos usuários. / The popularization of software architectures that provide support for distributed object-oriented programming, like CORBA, .NET, and Java EE, revealed the need for efficient security infrastructures to protect the resources of enterprise systems from malicious attacks. This protection usually begins with the identification of the users that interact with the systems, a process known as authentication. However, authentication alone is not enough to guarantee the protection of the resources, as it cannot determine what actions a particular user is allowed to execute on a given resource. In other words, an authorization mechanism is needed in order to enforce the access control policies as defined by the system administrators. In this dissertation we studied role-based access control mechanisms and the use of X.509 attribute certificates as data structures that store the users roles in a Java EE environment. Particularly, we added X.509 attribute certificates support to the existing JBoss application server security infrastructure. Furthermore, we evaluated the pros and cons of using these certificates, and compared the performance of the developed extension to the performance of the existing solutions provided by JBoss to store the users roles.

Este trabajo busca analizar el uso de los elementos emocionales del storytelling asociados al atributo del producto para reforzar la identidad de marca de Ford. Sabemos que, en el Perú, la oferta en automóviles es muy grande, por lo que cada marca intenta comunicar diferentes cosas sobre sus productos, desde aspectos tangibles de un automóvil, hasta tratar de darle una personalidad a cada uno. También sabemos que la elección de un producto como este es muy complicada, por lo que las marcas deben optar por comunicar de cierta forma que atraiga al consumidor y logre reforzar su imagen de marca. Es por eso que el storytelling se convierte en la mejor opción. Para este trabajo queremos saber si realmente la asociación entre el storytelling y los atributos del producto refuerzan la imagen de marca. Es por esto que, en primer lugar, analizaremos los conceptos de cada uno de los términos a estudiar. Comenzaremos con atributo del producto y seguiremos con storytelling, branded content e imagen de marca. De la misma forma, analizaremos el porqué de la elección de la marca y el modelo Ford Raptor en la investigación. Por último, a través de un trabajo de campo, estudiando a los miembros de nuestro público objetivo y profesionales relacionados al caso y a la marca, llegaremos a descubrir si la asociación del storytelling y de los atributos del producto refuerzan la imagen de la marca Ford. / This work seeks to analyze the use of the emotional elements of storytelling associated with the product attribute to reinforce Ford's brand identity. We know that, in Peru, the offer in cars is very large, so each brand tries to communicate different things about its products, from tangible aspects of a car, to trying to give each one a personality. We also know that choosing a product like this is no longer very complicated, so brands must choose to communicate in a way that attracts the consumer and manages to reinforce their brand image. That is why storytelling becomes the best option. For this work we want to know if the association between storytelling and product attributes really reinforces the brand image, in this case of Ford. This is why, in the first place, we will analyze the concepts of each of the terms to be studied. We will start with the product attribute and continue with storytelling, branded content and brand image. In the same way, we will analyze the reason for the choice of the Ford Raptor make and model in the investigation. Finally, through fieldwork, studying the members of our target audience and professionals related to the case and the brand, we will discover if the association of storytelling and product attributes reinforces the image of the Ford brand. / Trabajo de investigación

The diploma thesis deals with fuzzy logic and its use in business activities of a distribution company. Two models using fuzzy set theory are presented. These models are able to evaluate quality of customers through their attributes. Based on these calculations, they are classified into several price categories which differ in margin.